Daisy09

((((Siam))))

I missed this post over the weekend, too busy bowling with crazy 4 year olds!

I'm so glad that you've been letting light shine into your life, my friend!

:ghug3

Daisy

jamdls

Dang I'm the 5th child that makes me even more of a mistake? My mother never wanted kids and didn't like kids but she was Catholic and married to an Irish Catholic so what ya gonna do?

siamcat

I've been craving intense lately. Not alcohol but more than that. Drugs I've never before sought, powerful, final... Heroin, overdosage of LSD, pills, pink cocaine uncut. I want to feel intense painful euphoria shooting through my body. I want alchemy in powder-liquid-pill. I want the end and the beginning simultaneous...

I looked in the mirror today at work. There was something in my eyes I've never seen before. An alien madness, spitting daggers back at my like pythons.

Darkness... Can I do what I must to become one with the source? Do I have it in me to release my demons so pointedly, direct with that python spitting intensity? Intentionally? INTENTIONALLY!?!? What are the rules of madness? What does direction mean in a maze? Where dark cornered dead ends taunt, and circular psychic meanderings persist. How do I navigate this wounded source but through confusion? Becoming lost in it in order to find myself again... A self I barely might remember having once existed... Will I recognize what I find? Does it matter if I do? To become one is to cease to be at all. To lose myself first so that a new direction manifests. I want to unbecome. Unbecome with my source. Unbecome with my beautiful wounded eschaton...

Daisy09

Alchemy isn't real...it doesn't work. If it could be found in powder-liquid-pill form, the world wouldn't be the place it is today...

(((Siam))) Personally, I really hope you don't. I like you Siam, and I would miss you if you were to do anything foolish...

There are other ways to unbecome, Siam. You are the only one keeping yourself from breaking with your past and moving forward. I don't want to sound like a broken record, but the past is over. There is absolutely nothing you or anyone else can do to make it different. But the future is still out there, Siam, for you to make of it what you will.

The problem with madness is that it has no rules. Please steer clear of it. Siam, if you really feel unable to control your impulses, call someone. Anyone. Right away. A real, live person you can talk to who can respond to what you are saying. I hope you are well, and I hope to hear from you soon.

Daisy

Freepath

The trouble with being a group of former addicts and alcoholics involves our inability to draw upon professional knowledge or experience in the event that someone is having suicidal or homicidal ideation. That is best left to medical professionals.

I am facetious about a lot of things. I don’t like to take myself too seriously. I am deadly serious in matters of self management. If I become too unhappy with life, I am willing and ready to change where I live, the people I spend my time with and what I do. So the analogy of shake the snow globe could be construed to be too “make it happen” in it’s context. How about wipe the slate or flip the etch a sketch?

I am in the process of conducting an analysis of my life and which things need to be changed. This is a slow process because I do not want to dismantle one life that I don’t like in the name of fashioning another life that I don’t like. Nothing is sacred. I don’t care if it’s my job, my family, my friends, or my home. All areas need to be analyzed in the name of determining which ones need to be changed.

I have relapsed in the past, and I believe it has to do with failure to manage my life correctly. I suppose that adversity should not be an excuse to use or drink, but in the absence of any sources of happiness or contentment, it’s hard to find the motivation to abstain.

siamcat

I want to clarify as it seems my last post was misunderstood a bit. I reread it and it is completely rational that it should be, no one is in my head but me. Well, almost no one...

I am not currently suicidal, that is not what the post was about, eschatology to me is the hope of rebirth, transformation through a focused point in time, not an ending. It's in the Terence Mckenna context, not the Bible's, the source I spoke of is more difficult to explain, and I'm not ready yet. Suffice it to say I am in no physical danger, I'm not going to hurt myself, at least not intentionally, I have not been seriously suicidal in almost a year, and, if I was, you would not see me posting here, or anywhere, or even logged in, I would be laying in my bed, naked and unshaven, uncleaned for days or weeks, unfed, staring blankly at my ceiling thinking of absolutely NOTHING. But I don't want to think about that...

Incidentally Freepath, I decided when I was young the same thing as you. "Suicide is for the unimaginative" I told myself, this after years of early teen ideation, "If things get to sh*tty I'll just run away, hitchhike to New York, or out west, become a cross dressing circus hobo traveling condom salesman, ANYTHING, whatever, it is more romantic than death". It was a rational idea alright, and I stuck to it through all of my drinking years. What I didn't realize then, and not until after I first sought help with my addiction, is that it was the liquor that kept me alive. Do I thank liquor for keeping me alive all those years? Or do I curse it for covering up the intensity of a depression that now, unleashed after fifteen years smouldering, rushes me sometimes like some furious tsunami with no hope or thought of escape?

When I was thirteen I came the closest to doing it. I was standing on the roof of my house, resolved, empty, ready. Mere nano-seconds before I was going to jump a neighbor came out with a laundry basket in her hand, saw me and screamed, dropped it, ran inside. My 13 year old reaction was to run back inside, pretend she was crazy, that I had been in my room. I was a private person back then too, and I couldnt' STAND that thought of making a show, I wanted to die alone, I didn't want anyone to witness. Looking back I've often wondered if this was childish wishing, but I remember how I felt then, I remember how much I wanted to die, it wasn't for attention, I never told anyone, my parents were oblivious to my emotional problems, I kept it that way, and I do to this day.

There was something I felt back then that I lost when I drank, when I took drugs. Here was SOMETHING. Something that could make me FEEL. Something that could bring me closer to the gods! Something that could fill this gnawing void inside of my heart. Things felt differently then and that's when I decided about suicide, wrote it off as a prepubescent fantasy and moved forward with my life. I didn't have to think seriously again about it until I was 27, and ready to admit to myself that I was an alcoholic, that I needed help,... that I had to quit. At first I did great, as many do, I quit for months, I was at another online community then and it helped me immensely. Will power can be a great motivator for a time... But then, when I started getting REAL urges. When my AV was fed up with funking around and wanted a drink at ANY cost, that's when the trouble began. I had a complete mental breakdown in January of 07. I had NO idea what hit me. I hadn't felt anything like that since I was thirteen, since the last time I did not have access to alcohol whenever I needed it...

Apathy, blank, sucking SUCKING void inside of my chest, SUCKING so hard eternities of hopelessness and numbification at wild speeds through me downwards, pushing, I gasped for breath at the intensity and force and suddeness of this super heavy FILTH that had descended all around me, trapping me hopeless in its net, discoloring all the world around me in browns and grays and terror, complete terror and SO FUNKING FRIGHTENING!!! I couldn't breath. I couldn't work. I couldn't talk. I could only stare surreal all around me, heavy with pain, such aching aching ACHING pain! Have you ever had a toothache? The almost pulsing pain deep in root? Imagine that in your chest, your heart, sending shutters through your body, weakening you INTENSELY every goddamned moment for days, then weeks. What do you do? How do you react? How do you find release? When that pain turns to apathy, the next part of the reaction, for me, numb, stricken, remember McMurphy in One Flew Over The Cookoo's nest? Something like that, vegitable matter, no choice to get out, get back, no more reality, no more hope, all gone, blank, hurt, broken, lost. In the words of Roger Waters "Done roamin', done carin', done livin'".

Eventually I just drank, I NEEDED it to feel, it was the only way I knew, to get out, and it didn't feel good, it didn't feel good AT ALL. But it FELT! It FELT! IT FELT!!!! I had been covering something up for thirteen years, a ferocious infection of darkness and rot, suicide became the alternative, the way out, I once laughed at my past notions for hours during a madness spell,... 'what was I THINKING? lol, run away? Away from what? I'M the problem, not my external stimulation, the rot is INSIDE of me, cancerous in my body, my lungs my liver my heart my soul, it's in ME, I can't get it out by running away, god KNOWS I've tried, hoboing around this country for years, running away from myself. MYSELF! How do I get away from myself?...' Separation of spirit and matter.

I've had periodic breakdowns since, mostly when I go sober for long periods. Last summer was the last, I was ready, looking down at the rushing mississippi from the footbridge, feeling as if everything inside of me was petrified, dead, rotted hollow, I can still smell the funking rotting, I lay in bed for weeks after not moving, chain smoking. I promised then I would try meds if I ever got that bad again, I haven't, depression plenty, but not to that point, not for that long, that dire.

Anyway, I'll have a nice cup of shut the funk up now as I meant this post to be a few sentences of reassuring that I was in no physical harm. I have to go have a nice cup of coffee with my shut the funk up and get out of bed. I'm ok, just going a little mad, in a good way this time, it won't lead to the apathy, it will only lead to good things, this source is a positive source, this eschaton is a rebirth through love, what I've been waiting for for many lifetimes, and it is wonderful, if completely insane I know it didn't sound like that in my post, but rebirth is painful, and confusing, and many demons are released to allow the angels inside, a ripping apart of the world you've always known for a new life outside of womb and comfort, scarey, uber real, air, breath, life again, after so long.. and that is what I'm going through. I am happy today...

siamcat

'Just looking in the mirror
Will make you a brave man
I know my place
Hate my face
I know how I begin, and how I'll end
Strung out again'

I've been obsessing about this album lately. From a Basement on a Hill, Elliot Smith, compiled and released after his suicide. For years I listened to it without realizing, it was one long progressive suicide note, the whole album, poignant to me, I relate to these words, so much of it, the other song that resonates with the lyrics...

'He said really I just want to dance
Good and evil matched perfect, it's a great romance
I can deal with some psychic pain
If it'll slow down my higher brain
Veins full of disappearing ink
Vomiting in the kitchen sink
Disconnecting from the missing link

I see you're leaving me and taking up with the enemy
The cold comfort of the in-between
A little less than a human being
A little less than a happy high
A little less than a suicide
The only things that you really tried'

He was talking about himself, this whole album, an explanation... How much more difficult must that have been for him, he didn't have the option to become real again through all of this, surrounded by people who loved him for his words, his music, but could not understand the smoldering underneath eating him away. Rest in peace my friend, another too young too young, he made it 34 years, and gave us a lifetime of genius.

Daisy09

Have you ever read "Confederacy of Dunces"?

siamcat

Nope. You suggesting that I'm a dunce and should build a confederation of like-minded dunces? What a wonderful idea. Who's with me?

((((Daisy))))

Daisy09

Now you know I would never suggest such a thing, although I might join in

Nah, it's the rest of the world. It's one of my favorite books. You should really read it - I have a feeling you would enjoy it. The author is John Kennedy Toole.

(((Siam)))

siamcat

I'll put it on my mile long 'to read' list Daisy. I own about two hundred books right now that I've yet to read, and I keep buying more, like a hungry hungry, ... let's say.... Hippo. I've always been an information addict. The internet was the worst thing that ever happened to me. Still though, I prefer books, paper, musty from use, notations in the margins from college kids of the ninteen fifties, twenties, seventies, inscriptions on the first pages gifting books to long forgotten loves, there's nothing like a book gone through a life of its own. In seattle, twice a year, they would have a vast library sell off, tens of thousands of books in this big warehouse by the old naval base. Cheap cheap cheap. I would walk out with as many as two big bags could carry, before I had to lug them on the bus, when I had a car, even more. It's always been a peculiar problem of mine when I move, as I often do. When I moved to New York I sent all of the books I couldn't part with to my mothers house in Maine. I got rid of another two thirds, but there were still a few hundred at least. It took me FOREVER to get her to send them to Minneapolis when I moved here. She kept saying 'you're just going to move again siamcat, why don't you just keep them here until you 'settle down', lol, as if she somehow still thinks me the type to 'settle down'. Well, given recent events maybe she was right, my heart has always been in the west, I like it here but I always felt like Seattle was my home, and now that notion is pounded home in a way I never dreamed possible. So, this time, I'm really going to wait until I'm in a non sentimental mood, go through them all and IMMEDIATLY discard them, sell them, donate them, just get them out of my site before the inevitable 'second round' where I go through and convince myself I really should keep 'Defend the Shenandoah' for reference in case I ever read that Stonewall Jackson biography. Or that I really need three different biographies of Hilter, four of Napoleon, six of Augustus, five accounts of the Russian Revolution, and a 'History' of Atlantis written by some crackpot pre Cayce. Oh well...

Transformation. Acceptance. Love. Rushed over me from a greater purpose. Found. Stimulation. Mental. Physical. Spiritual. There is no differentiation anymore. The eastern definition of god, a flowing, a recognition, everything is light, everything is love, a rock, a bug, the clouds, a thought, everything flowing into each other and back out again, and now, realizing this instantaneous, through a miracle of 'chance', I become again part of this beauty, part of something eternal, no longer a cog in the wheel imagined, no longer rotting, stinking, seething with failure. I am whole, complete, amalgamated again. Through thousands of lifetimes I've found again. I've found and been found and am founding, becoming, with...

californiapoppy

I like the way you're thinking today.

siamcat

I'm having horrible cravings tonight. I wish I had something, something more than this. My skin itches for something. Such a crash, such a longing, such bullsh*t. I hate myself, I always lose. I always find a way to lose. What is my defect? What can I do to change this? Knowing now that I can feel again, why is there a leak still? Do I need my source constant? Will I drain away without it? Will it fail me? Leave me? Like everything else, habit formed too strong in nature. What is this funking world? Why do we continue in it? A circular swiveling pain, glimpsing beauty, unable to hold onto, hold onto, that's the problem, there is nothing I can contain, and I don't know how to let go, I know the logistics, just not the reality, what is it in me that disallows me to live the concept I grasp so easily? Why do I fail?

californiapoppy

Why do we all fail? I guess you just have to keep trying until one day it works.

evmdimples

Siam, I am in love with you, or at least your description of why you love books, lol!! As I sit here surrounded by a mountain of my recent reading choices, books on shamanism, buddhism, depression, codependancy, peter the great, st. francis (3 of those concurrently being read)... I can so relate... I also love books, old books, I specifically collect old books on health, nutrition and food although I have lots of other subjects in my collection. From the ridiculous to the sublime... from facsimiles of life in the colonies to Miss Piggy's guide to life. I can't afford antiques or first editions but I do have a few that date back to the early 1900's and many books and food pamphlets from world war II era. My collection is smaller than yours (I think? will have to check!) but like you, many are still unread, waiting for the right moment I guess, and I find that it does eventually arrive. Much of my collection has travelled with me throughout a couple of the countries where I've lived. I just can't seem to part with them! However, in my last move I did get rid of a few... and from my own personal experience, beware, if you do that... the need for that book does in fact come up... and a sad day it is when you realize you no longer have it! I've always said: I will always have my books as my constant companions!

nice to find shared passions!

As far as failure, yesterday I was reminded that failure is just another opportunity to succeed.

to success!

paulmh

There's a statue in Liverpool of Eleanor Rigby -



I've always liked it. People sit beside her and chat. Day and night. Funnily enough they've actually tidied it up for this photo - people usually leave a little posy or two in her lap. You can see on the plaque that the statue is sort've dedicated, like the song, to "all the lonely people".

siamcat

I like Plutarch Phal. I read him a lot when I was a teenager. His 'Lives of Rome' was my introduction, more or less, into Roman history. What's so sad about ancient authors is that so much was lost, so so much, I've read so many histories that just cut off halfway, with an italicized explanation that the rest of the history was lost. I'm really glad Herodotus wasn't though, we all got lucky there. I've been meaning to reread his histories, it's been about fifteen years, I think it would be worth a reread, though I rarely reread things outside of Brautigan and occassionally Tom Robbins (it's just comforting to me sometimes I guess).

evmdimples, I'm sorry, you're too late, I've discovered my beautiful eschaton, but it's nice to know there's someone who shares my passion for dusty literature. I know what you mean about the 'when you need that book' thing. That's happened to me TOO many times! But, with all the moving I do, always alone and always thousands of miles away from my previous bivouac, it is just impossible to keep ALL the books I acquire. If i did I would have well over a thousand in tow by now, I have about five hundred right now, and I came here, a year ago, with not more than 250, I'm fairly sure. I'm too hungry, it's really just as hard, or even harder for me to stay out of bookstores as it is to stay out of bars, and, if I DO go in, I won't walk out with less that five or six. I just wish there was more napoleonic stuff, it seems like there's none of it lately, and I'm hungry for original accounts, maybe I should just learn french, some of them aren't even translated yet. Oh well.

Eleanor Rigby statue heh? Weird. I think lonliness is such a modern side effect. A western specific one too. There were always recluses, the old man living in the cave on the mountain, but never so much as now, here, in a society that is so supra connected through electronic immediacy. We've truly constructed a world where people can be completely alone amongst millions. We should be so proud of our 'progress' shouldn't we? What crap. When we lost alchemy science was lost. When we lost nature, evolution was lost. When we lost each other, hope was lost. I don't think it's cynical, I think it's the tragic truth. Society, a word that means nothing anymore, a metallic construct we must form to, not the other way around. Community, family, tribe, what does any of that mean anymore? We have about as much emotional attachment to our society as an air guitar has to the philharmonic. We've lost tandem, purpose, we allow the least amongst us to 'lead', we allow our emotions to be controlled by light and shadow play, burned into our eyes and brains through billboard-television-magazine-media. Our thoughts no longer contemplated, but fed to us brand named and cold, unloving, directed with purpose of profit not health. We are a sick society, we've been sick for a long time, and the final separation, between the machine and the slaves, is coming soon. Yet, inside the greater patterns we are still able to form subcontext, still able to break free from the sinister purpose of corporation-governments, still allowed to feel and think, just disuaded from doing so. I don't know where I'm going with all this, just blabbering like an idiot, per usual, I'll stop now, I'm depressing myself...

siamcat

There's this taste in my mouth I was getting for a long time. A taste of rot and plastic, garbage, doom. For months and months I tasted this consistently. I assumed this taste was the taste of death, impending, death. It is said that yogi masters sense their deaths several months, if not years before it comes. A change in vibration, in olfactory sense, taste, sight, etc. Your senses change, your perceptions very subtley, I assumed this was what was happening to me. A few weeks ago this taste left me, no matter how hard I looked for it, it just wasn't there. For weeks this rot, this doom left me. Today it is back. It started before, early today while at work. A sense? Premonition of coming disaster? Or change in general? What IS this taste?

I feel like I've fallen off a cliff, a cliff climbed higher than I'd ever dreamed could exist, and now, so suddenly, accidentally, slipping and falling down free fall, against only space, nothing more to grasp, nothing to hold me, just this rotten, putrid funking TASTE! I'm very much considering drowning this taste in the cold comfort of carbonated alcohol tonight. I'm very much allowing my demons to whisper unabated, unchallanged. My rotten brain tells me it can't get any worse now, that I've already slipped off the edge and my beautiful view now is gone, shrinking towards me at phenomenal speeds, coming to crush me, splinter me, splatter me into a much darker, greater more mysterious void of eternal failure, the failure of nebula and super nova, the failure echoing through infinite time and space, the emptyness of entire universes within universes within universes peircing through me endlessly in sound horrible, terrifying, schreeching unrelent. God I'm slipping hard, so funking hard, what can stop this, can even slow this?

This taste, I hate this taste, I hate myself, my propensity for failure, for loss, why do I try? Haven't I learned? What good can become of loving, living, trying, breathing, fighting funking drinking jogging talking holding grasping crawling towards phantom worlds?? Sinking, that's all I feel. Sinking, and this rotten flavored death in my mouth...

Gypsy Feet

hmmm, it's sad that because it left you for awhile, you feel worse that it is back.
Ups and downs. I have had periods when I went from being terrified to ecstatic hourly. I have had times when life was so flat as to be mostly peaceful verging on depressingly boring.
Despair exists that we may know joy.

Stay in the now long enough and the next view promises to be even more spectacular.

californiapoppy

Wish I knew what to say. I have no idea where your feelings are coming from, sounds like hate. I can only give you what I know of myself. What I hate the most is what I am when I drink during and mostly after. Pain, anxiety, hate are amplified in a wave that engulfs me leading me to drink more and more to escape. Sober, I can decide that most things are not as consequent to me or to the world around me. I tend to say " Big deal" or "So what" I might also look at "the failure of nebula and super nova" as something quite extraordinary that leads to a new genesis. I look for ways to love life, it makes it so much easier.
You've been inspirational to me. I'm counting on you to grasp at something, stop the fall, and climb back up.